Lately, we've had the pleasure of working with two very interesting and capable customers, both of which were just on the verge of a product launch: Catalyst IT in New Zealand and SUSE in Germany.

In January, just after linux.conf.au 2015, we partnered up with Catalyst IT in New Zealand to deliver back-to back OpenStack training in the beautiful cities of Auckland and Wellington. A mixed crowd of Catalyst customers and employees went through our Cloud Fundamentals, Networking, Ceph and Security courses on the OpenStack platform. For us, it was an excellent experience to work with an extremely sharp Kiwi crowd that set aside some time in the New Zealand summer to learn about the world's fastest-innovating cloud platform.

We taught our two-day Cloud Fundamentals course both weeks, adding two extra days with alternate modules each week. In week 1, attendees went straight into our OpenStack Neutron deep-dive, Networking for OpenStack (HX102). HX102 is a dense, fast-paced, highly technical 2-day deep dive into software-defined networking, OpenStack Neutron, OpenFlow and Open vSwitch, and also includes advanced Neutron topic like LBaaS, FWaaS and VPNaaS. The class was so capable and eager that we even had some extra time to cover some OpenStack Heat content from our Orchestration and Scaling (HX107) class.

A couple of weeks later, Catalyst IT officially launched the Catalyst Cloud, New Zealand's first public cloud service, based on OpenStack. Congrats, Catalyst! We're happy to have made our small contribution.

At the same time that Catalyst Cloud launched, we were already on-site with our next major customer: at SUSE in Nuremberg, we helped a team of support engineers and consultants hone their expertise on Ceph. Again, we were working with a sharp and demanding crowd, multinational this time: we had folks from Germany, France, Senegal, Spain, the U.S., the U.K., and the Czech Republic in attendance.

We ran an extended version of our Ceph Distributed Storage Fundamentals (HX112) class — normally a 2-day course, customized and extended to 3 days. (I should perhaps mention, by the way, that we teach this course on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, SLES 12 and RHEL/CentOS 7.) Attendees got a deep technical introduction into the fundamentals of distributed storage, into RADOS, CRUSH, RBD, and RadosGW. We also covered Ceph integration in OpenStack (from our HX104 course) and even had time for a hands-on CephFS preview. Feedback from attendees was extremely positive with several reporting it was the best professional training class they had ever taken.

Next week, I will be teaching a course (OpenStack für Profis, in German) over at Heinlein in Berlin, Germany. Details are at Heinlein's website; I hear there is one slot still open. So if you want to grab that, you'd better be quick!

For those of you who couldn't make it to this week's OpenStack Summit, and for those of you who could but who have a friend or colleague who couldn't make it, here's a special treat: if you want to learn about OpenStack Juno in all gory details, we are making a special discount available for our next two OpenStack classes in Vienna, Bangalore, and Rio de Janeiro:

Check out our training schedule at http://academy.hastexo.com/schedule. You can sign up directly at any of the classes linked from there, and when you purchase your Professional Service Credits for attending these classes, you can use the special discount code openstacksummitparis for an extra 15% off. Here are just some of the classes for you to choose from, but the discount applies to all classes presently on our schedule:

The OpenStack Juno release has landed, right on time as usual, and it's time to say a big thank you to all those wonderful OpenStack developers and contributors across the globe. Thanks for continuing to build something awe-inspiringly wonderful!

If you want to learn about OpenStack Juno, there are multiple opportunities:

Just a quick reminder: today, August 6, is the last day you can vote for talks to be included in the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Paris, Nov 3-7. And my team and I would much appreciate if you could pitch in your vote for one or more of the following talks:

As you undoubtedly heard, a French services company has been acquired this week, in a deal worth approximately € 50M in cash plus € 20M in the acquirer's common stock.

As a result of news breaking about this deal, we have heard from community members about rumors floating around regarding our relationship with said acquiree, which are either erroneous or misleading. And just so we're all on the same page, I believe it is time to clarify.

No external company has invested in, nor acquired any stake in, nor lent to, hastexo at any time in the past. (And just in case you're wondering: acquiring shares in secret would not have been an option anyway, as information about GmbH shareholders is legally required to be public in Austria, where hastexo is incorporated.)

Given that they are now being acquired, it is unlikely that this specific company will do any of the above in the future.

Yes, said French company was in talks to acquire hastexo. This I can confirm without breaching any NDA, as word about this had been leaked as early as February of this year (and not by us, as they have previously acknowledged).

However, these talks did not come to a successful conclusion. Even if I were privy to more information about the reasons on the other party's end (which I am not), I could not elaborate further, as that would possibly involve information under NDA.

I am sorry if you're an employee of either company and were looking forward to working with us as colleagues, or if you spoke to someone who told you that the deal was already done, but neither of those assumptions are true. For the professional services and training quality that our customers love, and for our excellent OpenStack training offered under the hastexo Academy brand, drop us a note! We'll always be happy to help.

Disclosure: Both companies involved received 20 hours notice before the publication of this post, so as to point out any factual inaccuracies. They did not, but instead they did warn us against mention of their company names in this post, ostensibly under trademark restrictions. I am not a lawyer, but I am rather certain that the mere mention of their names would have constituted Fair Use under the applicable trademark laws and policies. Still, we respect their wish.

Right on the heels of the OpenStack Summit, there will be not one but two OpenStack classes offered by our friends at GigaSpaces:

From May 19-21, the week after the Summit, there's the GigaSpaces OpenStack Training NYC class. If you're on the East Coast, want to learn about OpenStack Icehouse, and can't make it to the Summit (or want do dive deep into Icehouse right after your return), this one is perfect for you.

OpenStack Israel is one of my favorite conferences on the circuit. This time around, I have the high honor of serving on the selection committee and it's thus part of my job to recruit speakers and ask for talk submissions. But even if I weren't on the committee, I'd still do it — because the conference is awesome. And time is running out to submit talks, so you need to get cracking!

p>Just coming off Percona Live 2014, we're speaking at two more conferences this week: the Open Source Data Center conference in Berlin, and the OpenStack India meetup in Mumbai. We'll have two of our best speakers covering Ceph at both of these events.